On 2/23/2012 5:35 PM, Stephen Hearn wrote:
> But there's a catch--when WorldCat redirects a search to the selected
> local library catalog, it targets the OCLC record number. If the
> holding library has included the OCLC record number in its indexed
> data, the user goes right to the desired record. If not, the user is
> left wondering why the title of interest turned into some mysterious
> number and the search failed.
I've been wishing OCLC would change this for a while.
When specifying WorldCat's redirects for your local catalog, it's
already possible to NOT specify an OCLCnum based search, but only
specify an ISBN, ISSN, etc search. If you do this, and the record HAS
an (eg) ISBN, it'll redirect to an ISBN search in your catalog. But if
the record doesn't have an ISBN, ISSN, etc, I think it'll just redirect
to your catalog home page.
So WorldCat is already capable of redirecting to an ISBN search. But if
you config the OCLCnum search, it seems it'll always use it instead.
I wish WorldCat instead would do the ISBN search if there is an ISBN, do
an ISSN search if there's an ISSN, and only resort to the OCLCnum search
if there's no ISBN or ISSN to search on. Or at least that could be a
configurable option. Would result in a greater proportion of succesful
'hits' when redirecting to local catalog, which may not have an OCLCnum
in it for every single record that it possibly could. (For that matter,
what about when there are multiple OCLCnums, multiple records, for the
same manifestation? For instance, a German language cataloging record
and an English language cataloging record, for the exact same
manifestation, have a different OCLCnum. Will OCLC ever send the German
language cataloging record OCLCnum and miss becuase you had the English
language one? I dunno).
Anyhow, I've tried making this suggestion before to relevant OCLC
people, but it's possible I never found the relevant OCLC people. It's
kind of hard to figure out how to make such feature suggestions to OCLC
in a way that won't just be dropped on the floor (not sure it's
possible, in fact).
Jonathan
> Stephen
>
> On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 4:11 PM, David Friggens<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>>>>> why local library catalog records do not show up in search results?
>> Basically, most OPACs are crap. :-) There are still some that that
>> don't provide persistent links to record pages, and most are designed
>> so that the user has a "session" and gets kicked out after 10 minutes
>> or so.
>>
>> These issues were part of Tim Spalding's message that as well as
>> joining web 2.0, libraries also need to join web 1.0.
>> http://vimeo.com/user2734401
>>
>>>> We don't allow crawlers because it has caused serious performance issues in the past.
>> Specifically (in our case at least), each request creates a new
>> session on the server which doesn't time out for about 10 minutes,
>> thus a crawler would fill up the system's RAM pretty quickly.
>>
>>> You can use Crawl-delay:
>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robots_exclusion_standard#Crawl-delay_directive
>>>
>>> You can set Google's crawl rate in Webmaster Tools as well.
>> I've had this suggested before and thought about it, but never had it
>> high up enough in my list to test it out. Has anyone actually used the
>> above to get a similar OPAC crawled successfully and not brought down
>> on its knees?
>>
>> David
>
>
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